One of my favorite books about the High Holydays is This is Real & You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation, by Rabbi Alan Lew. In it, Rabbi Lew brings together his background in Zen Buddhism with his profound Jewish knowledge to explore the spiritual power of the Days of Awe and the days surrounding them.
In framing these holy days as a “journey,” Lew interestingly begins not at Rosh Hashanah, or even Elul, the month leading up to the new year, but with Tisha b’Av. I had not realized, before I first read this book, that Tisha b’Av falls exactly seven weeks before Rosh Hashanah. Lew writes:
“Tisha b’Av is the moment of turning, the moment when we turn away from denial and begin to face exile and alienation as they manifest themselves in our own lives—in our alienation and estrangement from God, in our alienation from ourselves and from others. Teshuvah—turning, repentance—is the essential gesture of the High Holiday season. It is the gesture by which we seek to heal this alienation and to find at-one-ment: to connect with God, to reconcile with others, and to anchor ourselves in the ground of our actual circumstances, so that it is this reality that shapes our actions and not just the habitual, unconscious momentum of our lives” (pp. 41-42).
Tisha b’Av is the reminder that we have to really sit with what is broken, to feel and express our grief, our despair, our sorrow, before we can begin a journey of transformation. In the theology of the early rabbis, the destruction of the Temples was due to the sins of the Jewish people. While this is historically incorrect, Lew teaches that it brings a lesson: that we are not powerless in the face of the calamities we face. As Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav taught, “If you believe you are powerful enough to break things, then believe you are powerful enough to fix them.”
So as we head into Shabbat Chazon, the Shabbat of “vision” before Tisha b’Av, I pray that we can summon the courage to really sit with all that is broken in our own lives and in the world around us, but not for the sake of despair. Rather, as a needed acknowledgment of how much pain we and the world around us is carrying in this moment, and a reminder that we—individually and collectively—have the power to make change. As Lew writes, “We can enter the present moment of our lives and consciously alter that moment. We can end our exile.” There is a beautiful rabbinic tradition that the Messiah will be born on Tisha b’Av. Within all the chaos of the world, there is also the great possibility of transformation. And the rabbis also remind us that Shabbat is a “taste of the world to come,” of the Messianic age. May we get a bit of a taste of a world transformed as we celebrate Shabbat, and be strengthened to bring that “taste” into the weeks to come.
